“Is that all you can tell me about your tenants, Mr. Adkins? I am not prompted by idle curiosity in my inquiries. I have a very strong motive——” “Don’t trouble yourself to explain, sir. I know nothing about Mr. and Mrs. Danvers which I have any desire to hold back—or which I am under any obligation to keep back. My business relations with the gentleman never went beyond letting him Myrtle Cottage, which I let to him without a reference, on the strength of a twelvemonth’s rent in advance, and a deuce of a hurry he was in to get into the place. As for Mrs. Danvers, you may be surprised to hear that I never saw her face. I’m not a prying person, and, as the rent was never overdue, I had no occasion to call at the house. But I did see some one who had a strong bearing upon the lady’s life, and a very troublesome customer that person was.” “Who was he?” “No less an individual than her husband. A man dashed into this office one winter afternoon, a little after dusk, and asked me if I had let a house to a person called Danvers? I could see that he had been drinking, and that he was in a state of strong excitement; so I answered him shortly enough, and I kept him well between myself and the door, so as to be able to pitch him out if he got troublesome. He told me that he’d just come from Myrtle Cottage, that he had been refused admittance there, although the woman who lived there was his wife. He wanted to know if the house had been taken by her, or by the scoundrel who passed himself off as her husband? If it had been taken in her name it was his house, and he would very soon let them know that he had the right to be there. I told him that I knew nothing about him or his rights; that my client’s tenant was Mr. Danvers, and that there the business ended. He was very violent upon this, abused the tenant, talked about his own wrongs and his wife’s desertion of him, asked me if I knew that this man who called himself Danvers was an impostor, who had taken the house in a false name, and who was really a beggarly barrister called Dalbrook; and then from blasphemy and threatening he fell to crying, and sat in my office shivering and whimpering like a half-demented creature, till I took compassion upon him so far as to give him a glass of brandy, and send my office lad out with him to put him into a cab.” “Did he tell you his name or profession?” “No, he was uncommonly close about himself. I asked him if the lady’s name was really Danvers, and if he was Mr. Danvers; but he only stared at me in a vacant way with his drunken eyes. It was hopeless trying to get a straight answer from him about anything. Heaven knows how he got home that night, for he wouldn’t tell the office boy his address, and only told the cabman to drive to Holborn. ‘I’ll pull him up when I get there,’ he said. He may have been driven about half the night, for all I can tell.” “Was that all you ever saw or heard of him?”